GPU Compute

Despite 750ti being on the market for a year and GTX980 for 4 months, the GPUs are still new and software support is often lacking. Maxell GM200 chips support CUDA 5.2 so some developers may have to update their apps.

While Computemark LuxMark and Folding at home showed large speed-ups, the ubiquitous 'DirectCompute and OpenCL benchmark' gave us poor performance on DirectCompute and OpenCL was broken. Application support issue.

We are testing using the first driver for GM206 and things WILL change.

Coin Mining

Upon release the maxwell based GTX 750ti was a hit with coin miners due to its greatly improved compute performance per watt compared to older GEFORCE and for a period was the choice with coin miners. We present some coin mining benchmarks but this is not meant to be an endorsement that a GTX 960 is ideal for mining or should be used for coin mining, but simply a representation of launch performance.

At time of launch two tools support GTX 960, CUDAminer from 2014 works with maxwell and ccminer release 31 from 2015 natively supports GTX 960. ccminer is an evolution of cudaminer, supporting more ciphers. We last tried CUDAminer on the GTX980 and got about 560 mhash/s throughput with the GTX 960 now achieving 330, above the ballpark for its specs.

This is the first review we have used ccminer with. It defaults to 'x11' GPU mining and achieves 5020kH/s in benchmark mode on EVGA GTX 960 SSC.